"There's nothing we can do about it, continue with launch check," Capel said. He held the palm of his hand flat over the interior wall next to his station, and then, very gingerly, touched it with just the tip of his index finger. The skin of the ship was getting warmer as the heat percolated through the many thermal protection insulation layers. Already the sweat was streaming out of their bodies, dripping down their brows, getting into eyes, making it that much harder to see.
"Hyperplasmic piles charged. Plasma start-up sequence activated," Moela reported from the engineering station’s computer wall. Moving back to the console’s instrumentation, she continued, "Primary antigrav drive reading at ‘Go’ status. All fields prepped for Space entry. Projector iris hatch reads ‘Open’. "
"Check." This from Retho.
"Read confirm on all plasma parameters," Nicraan called out from the command section. "Read confirm on all soliton propagators."
"Confirmed," came Moela, glancing at the engineering indicators.
"Confirm stabilized shielding clouds."
Moela looked at another control, and then reported, "Confirmed. Activating Debye-Dirac delta functions."
Nicraan tabbed icons on his control spread that denoted engine functions, calling out as he read a holoset's report, "Net harmonic oscillation established."
"Confirmed adequate electron plasma frequency." Moela checked other indicators and called, "Reading all curvature drifts and polarization drifts within functional parameters. Magnetic and Electromagnetic containment fields established and holding. Registering sustained magnetic moments and adiabatic invariants. No change in gyroperiods."
On Nicraan's holoset there appeared a hologram of the sinusoidal motion of the charged particles in the plasma fields’ high-frequency electric and magnetic fields; they resembled shimmering rain-effect spirals by the billions. "Reading confirmed pondermotive force from oscillation center. Have standby status on dimensional velocity distribution," he called to Moela.
"All plasma functions now on full standby. All wave forms and dielectric functions on standby," Moela said, nodding as she looked over the engineering board. "Reading confirm from all reaction control system thruster assemblies. Secondaries still not functioning," Moela frowned at the crimson readout on her console’s overhead assembly. She took a deep breath, wincing as her unborn child kicked her from inside.
"Affirmed. Orbital re-entry computed and programmed. Am matching up positions with available pre-crash and shuttle recon star chart data now," said Nicraan hitting a series of contact points in sequence.
Digits flashed above Capel's head. "Good enough. We'll correct when we're up, if necessary." he looked confident at the male who occupied the flight seat beside him and gave the pilot a thumbs-up for ‘Good Luck’.
Nicraan Matasire returned the gesture and said, "Standby for liftoff."
Waves of sleet and then rain pounded against the bow viewport. Lightning burst continuously, turning the false night's darkness brighter than the planet's three suns combined. The winds were blowing more and more fiercely as the primary sun dumped more and more energy at the planet. The ambient heat was incredible, filled with noxious gases that could eat into skin, into eyes.
Capel Perezsire felt hot. Sweating, he gazed through the bowport. Torrential rain whipped across the valley floor and beat against the syntheglass. The overhead clouds darkened, and lightning seemed to illuminate each individual raindrop into a billion tiny glowing spheres. Simultaneous thunder shook the deck plates, the ship, and the planet.
Out the bowport the prepping crew had a framed virtual reality postcard of smoldering volcanic peaks in a one hundred and eighty degree view. The uplifted jagged eastern and western horizons were suddenly smoking as stone began to liquefy.
Beside Capel, Nicraan Matasire began computing flight characteristics based on anticipated friction force, vibration of ascent, and wind shear. Out the bowport, the volcanic horizon was active again; large clouds were rising and gathering in the mushrooming shape of banyan trees. The two pilots were looking at molten ash and pumice being ejected from the smoking peaks at almost the speed of sound. Snow that had begun to fall on the volcanic eastern slopes to became sleet as the world's temperature shifted upward. The sleet was driven by fierce winds across the valley floor. Some of it burst upon the bowport, stuck and then flowed in wet, slushy droplets streaking the syntheglass.
The amount of ash and pumice being emitted was incredible according to incoming reports, about 10,000 tonnes every micronode, equivalent to 300 juggernauts. Some of the material, the white pumice, started to fall on the area to the south of the volcanoes. The larger pieces were as big as a small melon. In the following moments, the columns of material had climbed nine mets into the sky and were visible from the podship’s distance some thirty kiloretems away, across the desert where it was raring to launch.
The pumice was less dense than water and so it floated in the small inland sea and the regions small ponds, rivers, and receding pools. Mixed with it, however, were lithics, volcanic rock fragments, dense chunks of dark gray rock torn from the inside of the volcanoes by the pressure of the erupting magma. These landed with great force, breaking through forest canopies, smashing vegetation, and causing serious injury to any fauna trying to escape.
Nothing landed on Pioneer 4 or the surrounding desert, the wind blew toward the northeast, taking the falling volcanic material out over the sea and away from inland regions. The anxious Aidennians had a clear view of the volcanoes, the gray eruption columns were posed almost directly above them, and they felt the continuous tremors of the volcanoes as they shook the podship’s bulkheads and brought down the desert plain’s rocky weatherworn vertical stony sediment features that had stood undisturbed for millennia.
"All antennas are retracted and confirmed all TPI hull shutters closed; switching system over to NGS scanner assembly," Moela called from the engineering console, her voice almost lost in the din of the ship's antigrav whine that began to resonate through the Pod. "Electromagnetic flux of planet's sun increasing in reaction to supergiant's magnitude. Primary star output has now increased its brightness by thirty-five percent. And, I'm picking up another earthquake at the Pylon Crater."
That quake did it.
Crack!
Huge vents opened across the desert planetscape’s stress points. Fissure lines met. Light flared in multiple locations as previously inert summits were transformed into active volcanoes. Sierras began to crumple in upon themselves as if made from burnt paper. The threatening red-yellow glow of fresh lava appeared as syrupy magma boiled to the crimpled surface.
Some sixty mets from the podship crash site, the entire disposed pylon crater's side fell as gases exploded out with a roar heard even by the podship crew. The whole top of the snow-coned mountainous rim was gone. Where volcanoes had towered lofty, nearly-symmetrical, there now squatted an ugly, flat-topped, truncated abomination. From its center rose a broad unremitting explosion of ash, turning blue-gray in the overspreading shadow of its ever-widening cloud. In the far deepening gloom, orange lightning flashed like the flicking of serpents' tongues. From the foot of the awesome mountains there spread a ground-veiling pall.
The incredible blast rolled north, northwest, and northeast at aircraft speeds. Tobogganing on a cushion of hot gases, the disintegrating north wall and cascades of rock swept down over the region and its riverways, burying them under as much as two hundred retems of new fill, which spread downstream in a 15-met-long debris flow. In one continuous thunderous sweep, it scythed down giants of forest, clear-cutting two hundred square mets in all. Within three mets of the summit, the landscape simply vanished -- everything transported through the air for unknown distances. Then came the ash -- fiery, hot, blanketing, suffocating -- and a hail of boulders and ice. In those first few micronodes of the eruption, the collapsing north face of the Pylon Crater volcanoes sent juggernauts of ice tumbling down into hot ash. Quickly the ice melted, and some forty-six billion gallons of
water gave birth to floods. Gooey, smelly, unstoppable debris obliterated rivers, downed trees, and landscape. Like a monster, floods of a special kind -- mudflows -- swept a million logs to churn on the flood crest.
The air-tsunami blast fanned out its hurricane wave of scalding gases and fire-hot debris traveling at two hundred mets a node. The multi-chrome, three-dimensional world of trees, hills, and sky became a monotone of powdery gray ash, heating downed logs till they smoldered and blazed. Roiling in the wake, the abrasive, searing dust in mere macronodes clouded over the same two hundred square mets and beyond, falling on the earth by milliretems and then by retems.
The failed north wall of the volcanic crater rim had become a massive sled of earth, crashing irresistibly downslope until it banked up against the steep opposite far wall. This was the moment of burial. The eruption's main force then nozzled upward, and a light-eating pillar of ash quickly carried to thirty thousand retems, to forty thousand, to fifty, to sixty... The top curled over and anviled out and flared and streamed broadly eastward on the winds.
The day turned forebodingly gray and to a blackness in which an appendage could not be seen in front of any eye. In the eerie gray and black, relieved only jabs of lightning, filled with thunder and abrading winds, the unsuspecting Pioneer Pod 4 continued with its liftoff.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR:
Unbeknownst to the Aidennians, the polar volcanic mountain ranges were a shimmering, smoldering spectrum of grays; powder light when dry, almost black when water-soaked, with many shades between. In the vast debris flow that flooded the choppy inland sea, laid chunks of ice from glaciers of uplifted ice sheets from the polar bedrock, a few as small as ground transport vehicles. They were melting and creating wet circles like grief-darkened eyes across their facets. Swirls of evaporating mists steamed in and around the icebergs; the waters looked as if ghosts were bathing. Other ice, already melted on the volcanic slopes, had left moon-like craters. The drying mud lay arrested in a million heavings and writhings of recent furies.
From time to time the grumbling air was punctuated by the high-pitch cleaving of glaciers as skyscraper-sized vertical ice bluffs cracked in free-fall, tumbling into the icy bays with more and more rapidity. Ejecta were cannoned out of the polar peaks as if shot by flamethrowers, molten cinders fell back down onto the ice sheet in a hissing rain; melting the permafrost and floes as if hit by a corrosive acid. Ice missiles ejected from magma eruptions had also bombarded the surviving mountains above the polar seas. Wherever frozen chunks had landed along the mountain bases, dark vertical streaks of melt now stained the ash slopes like the bleeding of wounds.
The tortured planetary atmosphere raged in telltale sounds of raging storms across the collapsing polar caps. Sky and sea and ice and soot were a uniform black mass under the sheeting, wind-whipped rain. Each time there was a flash of lightning, a split-moment glimpse of erupting polar volcanoes broke through the howling pitch as illuminated veins of flame.
The planet had become primordial.
Fifteen thousand square mets of sky was now consumed by a monstrous veil of ash, created by the release of gas of hemorrhaging molten rock. The cloud was alive with a blizzard of pin-sized fragments of volcanic glass. It suddenly seemed as if it was snowing. Visibility was falling by the heartbeat.
By now the sky even over the desert plain had darkened as if it were dusk, obscured by the gray eruption clouds of the horizon and of the Pylon Crater region and the volume of ash and falling pumice. To the south and west a line of light could be seen on the horizon, just like sunrise or sunset, but it was almost the middle of the daytime.
Pioneer 4 was shaking from the constant earth tremors, bouncing on its strut jacks. The desert plateau crescent range volcanoes seemed to unify and were now ejecting magma at an even greater rate as if the very planet was hemorrhaging, and the columns of material over the volcanoes had grown to ten mets. Climbing into the stratosphere – twice the height at which the podship would be flying on its initial escape vector – the millions of volcanic particles rubbing together triggered spectacular lightning strikes. The area onto which the material that had already been ejected was falling was 50 centiretems deep in ash and pumice. As the rate of ash fall increased, so did the size of the pumice particles; some had doubled in size and were large enough to be fatal on impact. Ash accumulated at 13 centiretems per node.
Then the wind shifted and came from the west, taking the Pylon Crater range fallout directly over the desert plain to mix with the crescent ring of fire’s vertical debris. As the mushroom-shaped ash columns continued to rise steadily to 27 kiloretems, the thrown out ash spread inexorably over the much larger arid area. The vibrations were now continuous, with rumbling and occasional large shocks.
When the unified eruption cloud reached 30 kiloretems into the sky, the eruption pattern changed: the magma was now coming from much deeper inside the volcanic chambers. It was hotter, heavier, and not so rich in gas. As the columns became denser, they also became less stable and were more likely to collapse. From the bowport, the anxious crew saw a red jet rising from the summit of the highest volcano, it was almost 3 kiloretems high, but the dark billowing clouds of ash obscured most of it. The ash clouds also had a lot of lightning, some of the flashes extending to the height of the clouds.
Above the podship was an amazing light show; around it tremors through the ground made everything vibrate. A crescendo was reached as the first of six pyroclastic surges occurred. A huge glowing red fountain shape emerged from the columns of ash and cascaded down the sides of the volcanoes in quick succession as each surge followed the next. The fuming mountain’s mouths had collapsed, and the amount of material being ejected increased. The ash clouds had reached their peak, 33 kiloretems above the ridgeline. The main column was so dense that it did not mix properly with the air carrying it upwards and it began to collapse.
Collectively, the ash columns and the ruddy main cloud flowed down the slopes of the volcanic mountain range towards the desert. This avalanche of dry, hot ash, rock fragments and gas traveled at a speed of 100 kiloretems per node with a temperature in excess of fifteen hundred noches Heit. Within heartbeats the billowing, glowing, hot, dry, surge cloud would be rushing down the dunes of the desert plain. It would split over the sandy walls and rocky mesas like dry ice. In three to four macronodes the surge would overrun the desert. It would sweep over rocks, up the surrounding hills and across the extended plain. The surge would be impossible to outrun, but perhaps outfly.
Swathed in roiling mud, sand, and water, the Pioneer 4 began to vibrate of its own accord. A roaring rose over the howl of the surge storm that had invaded the crash site. Now a mechanical-made thunder echoed across the hillocks and shattered basalt columns that composed the flatlands. It mutated as its intensity increased, altered its frequency; some parts of the sound envelope were enhanced, while others were suppressed by the surging pyroclastic storm.
"Standing by to launch," said Retho.
The surging blanket of pyroclastic ash began to dissipate as a tectonic convulsion wracked the area. Rivers of lava, pushed up from a magma chamber began to bleed from the side vents of the valley’s grotto volcano. Its pewter tuft suddenly glowed orange as an explosion ripped from its column, sending a hail of marble-sized debris mets into the sky.
Lightning ricocheted from one ashy cloud rim to the next, thunder crackled at sonic velocity over vibrating lowlands. It seemed the end of all rotates. A new pulse from the grotto’s volcanic apex sent air-filled volcanic cinders to rocket out of its fiery throat only to plummet with comet-like tails back down and onto the changing low-landscape below. This was the first area to feel their sting. This barrage of boulder-sized lava bombs bombarded whatever flora was still remaining, igniting it.
Moela stared at her instrumentation in disbelief. She did not want to accept the readouts and she especially did not want to report them to her commander, but she had no choice.
“Sire, gravitational sensors have gone off
the scale. The physics that have been set in motion have caused a disruption to the planet’s primary sun’s core that will consume the star, causing it to collapse in on itself.” She swallowed with difficulty. “Once initiated, such a reaction cannot possible be stopped. Depending on the rapidity of collapse, it will consume all matter in its vicinity. Including us, if we remain too long in orbit...”
Silence followed the lieutenant commander’s evaluation. Everyone tried not to look at each other; everyone failed. On all available holosets condensed versions of available astrophysical information materialized.
“How long?” Perezsire asked simply.
Moela fought back tears that threatened. “Macronodes --- Commander.”
Weakened by the actions of magma and acidic gas, only a few hundred retems away from the saucer, a whole hillock that had served as an ancestral rookery for a flock of flying reptiles with wings like those of bats, collapsed and suddenly split open with a great roar of tortured rock.
There hadn’t been enough warning for the pterosaurians, the succession of blasts that desecrated the ledges was rapid enough to pulverize the hatchery and flash-roast the chicks and their guardians before either were the wiser of what was happening. Smoldering ash was all that was left of the generational breeding ground in a matter of moments as scarlet light and intense heat fanned out of the fissure.
The glowing magma thrust upward though the breach in the planet's crust. The waterfalls that tumble down the remnants of the hillside flowed into the crack and over the liquidities of rock, and along with the torrents of the deluge, exploding into superheated steam. The crew shifted their attentions to the bowport, where they could see the jagged horizon-line in the distance. Fires could be seen blazing along it. The sudden burst of blinding light had blown the buttes apart, disintegrating them into thousands of molten pieces.
Activity on the flight deck came to a halt, as the crew looked on in stunned silence as the blazing light left retinal images which blurred and flashed to blur and fade. It was then that they noticed the glare had been severe enough to activate the bowport’s reactive photochromic polarization, giving an even greyer pallor to the dying desertscape.
Sidereal Quest Page 21
